ROCKWOOD — A hefty tariff on an item that shouldn’t be hit with such an import tax could close a company that makes carbon fiber, the firm’s president says.

“If this duty is maintained for another year, we may shut down in Rockwood,” said Rob Klawonn, president of Toho Tenax America Inc.

The company, located since 2004 in the Roane County Industrial Park, now employs 130 people. It makes superstrong carbon fiber — used in a variety of ways by different customers — from a special acrylic fiber.

Because it imports the acrylic fiber from Japan, Toho Tenax falls under an years-old tariff law set up to protect American clothing textile mills from foreign competitors dumping textiles in the U.S. at or below cost.

Klawonn says that tariff shouldn’t even apply to the company’s import because that raw material has nothing to do with making clothing.

That 7.5 percent tariff is costing the Rockwood company at least $500,000 a year and in boom years, as much as $1.5 million, Klawonn said.

“Over the last nine years, we’ve probably paid the government $10 million,” he said.

The threat to the Rockwood plant, he said, is that Toho Tenax’s parent company will decide to move its carbon-fiber production to foreign countries that don’t have such tariffs.

Klawonn says he’s been trying to get relief from the import tax for years but has run into a nightmare of bureaucratic red tape. It falls under an outmoded tariff code that has somehow managed to survive, he said. “It’s a major ordeal to have the fiber identified uniquely,” he said. “To create a new subcode (in tariff codes), it’s like pulling teeth or worse.”

“It would take a lobbying effort that would probably cost millions,” he said.

The company has instead focused on trying to obtain a Foreign Trade Zone status that would allow the imported fiber to be duty-free. “There are literally hundreds of these across the county,” said Jeff Deardorff, manager of the Greater Knoxville Foreign Trade Zone.

Deardorff said a competing company with an Alabama plant, Hexcel, took notice of Toho Tenax’s application and filed an objection to the FTZ application.

“They feel Toho is going to break into their product market, which Toho is not,” Deardorff said.

Klawonn said whenever an objection to a FTZ application is filed, the Commerce Department has to take the request under study. “And whenever a government agency needs to study something further, you’re talking years if not decades,” he said.

“It (the application) went to the FTZ examiners, and it confused them,” he said. “They don’t have a strong grasp of our industry.”

It normally takes about six months to obtain FTZ status, but the application still hasn’t been approved three years later. “We went through several rounds of questions and answers,” Klawonn said. He’s also been to Washington, D.C., on several occasions to meet with lawmakers on the impasse.

“I’m a little disappointed that our senators (Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker) and representative (Chuck Fleischmann) are not more effective,” he said. “Political support for Hexcel seems a little stronger.”

Klawonn said because of the tariff’s negative effect on the Rockwood plant, “we’re on the edge in this economy. We’re like a cat with nine lives, and we’ve already consumed eight of them.”